You can finally watch the extended Dying Light 2 gameplay demo. Techland released the full demo today, showcasing the sequel's expanded parkour, its decision-driven quests and world, and plenty of zombies.
This is the same demo that we saw in our Dying Light 2 E3 2019 preview (as it happens, we saw a separate section of the game for our Dying Light 2 Gamescom 2019 preview, which you can check out here.) It opens with protagonist Aiden Caldwell on a mission to reestablish the city's water supply at the behest of his buddy Frank, who reckons a disreputable faction leader named the Colonel is the key to the water supply. Things head south and Frank gets shot, so your angry mutual friend Matt takes over as quest guide as you make your way to the Colonel's base.
Having played the first Dying Light to death, a few things jump out to me. Firstly, the parkour looks much smoother and more flexible. Aiden can jump, slide, climb, swing, wall run, roll, grapple, and glide through the city. He can grab zombies and use them as landing pads to survive big falls, and he can flying drop-kick them to the moon. A stamina bar limits your movement, but it refills quickly, and Aiden never struggles with slowdown in the demo.
We also see a fair bit of combat. Dying Light 2's first-person melee combat looks familiar, but it's got some new tricks, like the ability to grapple debris and bring it down on enemies. The dismemberment physics are noticeably better, too, and that's a video game-ass sentence if I've ever written one. Aiden's got some new anti-zombie tech as well, like the UV flashlight and flare he uses to escape a so-called Dark Zone, which is basically a quarantined horde of zombies. There's also a new gun called the Scorpio which, in Techland's words, "basically one-shots your enemies." Nifty.
All that being said, the stars of the demo are the decisions Aiden makes along the way. We go after the Colonel instead of staying to help Frank, and we later pursue the water pumps instead of searching for a doctor. As a result, Frank dies. And when we finally encounter the Colonel, he tells we've been misled and tries to prevent us from turning on the water. We press on - don't want Frank's death to be in vain - and open the city's dam, revealing an entirely new, fully explorable section. However, judging from the freaky fish zombies that pop out of the ground like daisies, we've both literally and figuratively opened the floodgates.
This is all exciting stuff, and it lines up with what we've heard from Techland throughout the year. Producer Kornel Jaskula reckons Dying Light 2 is the first game of its type, and that it has so much content and so many divergent branching paths that you can't possibly see it all in one playthrough.
Dying Light 2 is the culmination of everything Techland has learnt making zombie games. For more details, read up on how The Witcher 3 and Game of Thrones inspired it, and how it's pushing co-op in cool new ways.
